Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

"I don't think so," Julia said, after having mulled over the dog question (did they ever agree about anything?). "No, not a pointer. And certainly not an English one. Perhaps an Old Danish pointer. That's 'Old' with a capital 'O,' Mr. Brodie, in case you think I'm referring to your age. Or perhaps a Large French one. Ditto with the 'L' there, Mr. Brodie. But you know, Milly, I think Mr. Brodie is a German shepherd. You can just tell he would drag you out of a burning building or a river in flood. He would save you!" She turned to Jackson and gave him the benefit of a brilliant theatrical smile. "Wouldn't you?"

"Would I?" Jackson said.

Amelia stood up abruptly and announced, "That was lovely but we can't spend all day enjoying ourselves," and Julia roused herself and said, "Yes, come on, Milly, chop-chop, we have shopping to do. Mystery shopping," she added, and Amelia groaned and said, "I hate mystery shopping."

Jackson took out his wallet to pay the bill. He had been keeping the photograph of Olivia in his wallet and every time he opened it to prize out one of his almost-exhausted credit cards, he saw her face, grinning at him. Not really grinning at him, of course, but at whoever was behind the camera.

"Mummy," Julia said. "Daddy never took photographs." All three of them stared sadly at the photograph.

"Julia and I are the only ones left," Amelia said. "We're the only two people left in the whole world who remember Olivia. We can't go to our grave not knowing what happened to her."

"Why now, after all this time?" Jackson asked.

"It's not 'after all this time,'" Amelia bristled. "We never forgot about Olivia. It's just that finding Blue Mouse, I don't know, it's as if it found us."

"Three of us," Julia corrected Amelia. "Sylvia remembers Olivia."

"Sylvia?" Jackson puzzled.

"Our eldest sister," Amelia said dismissively. Jackson waited, letting his silence ask the question for him. Eventually, Julia answered, "She's a nun."

"And when exactly were you going to tell me about her?" Jackson asked, trying not to sound as annoyed as he felt.

"We're telling you now," Julia said as if she were the embodiment of reason. "Don't be a crosspatch, Mr. Brodie. You're a much nicer person than you pretend to be, you know."

"No, I'm not," Jackson said.

"Yes, you are," Julia said. (Why didn't they just go, for God's sake?) Suddenly, to Jackson's surprise, Julia stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you," she said, "for coming to the funeral and everything."

Jackson started to worry about being late. On the way back to the car park he had to fight his way against a herd of foreign-language students, all entirely oblivious to the existence of anyone else on the planet except other adolescents. Cambridge in summer, invaded by a combination of tourists and foreign teenagers, all of whom were put on earth to loiter, was Jackson's idea of hell. The language students all seemed to be dressed in combats, in khaki and camouflage, as if there were a war going on and they were the troops (God help us if that were the case). And the bikes, why did people think bikes were a good thing? Why were cyclists so smug? Why did cyclists ride on pavements when there were perfectly good cycle lanes? And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.

And as for the tourists… enthralled by the colleges, by history, they didn't want to see what was behind all that, the money and power. The vast tracts of land they owned, not just in Cambridge, they owned most of Cambridge anyway. The colleges still yielded influence over licenses and leases and God knows what else. Someone had once told him that they used to say that you could walk the length of England and never leave land owned by Trinity. And all those beautiful gardens they had that you had to pay to go into. All that wealth and privilege in the hands of a few while the streets were full of the dispossessed, the beggars, the jakies, the mad. Cambridge seemed to have a particularly high incidence of insanity.

Still – and it was a close call – Jackson preferred the summer population to the yahs and hooray Henrys of term time. Was it just the envy of the underclass? Was it his father's voice in his head that he could hear? Jackson worried that he was turning into a grumpy old man. Perhaps being a grumpy old man wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Having a permanent toothache didn't help, of course. ("Endodontic treatment," Sharon had murmured seductively in his ear during his last appointment.)

Jackson double-parked outside the house. The windows had wooden Venetian blinds rolled up so that he could see inside the living room – floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, potted palms, big couches – shabby but arty, academics, probably. The street was choked with oversize SUVs, the middle-class mother's vehicle of choice, the rear windows all sporting the obligatory child on board and baby on board signs. Jackson lit up a cigarette and put on Lucinda Williams's Sweet Old World as an antidote. There were balloons tied to the gatepost signaling its status as a house en fete. The sound of little girls' hysterical screams rose up from the garden at the back and filled the air like the call of some terrifying prehistoric bird. The SUVs were empty, the drivers all inside, but Jackson decided to stay in the car. He didn't feel up to facing the inquisitive female warmth that always seemed to greet him whenever he walked into the midst of a pack of mothers.

He leafed through some of the many papers and files he had brought with him from Theo's house. The room – the "incident room" as he now thought of it – wasn't Laura's bedroom, that was at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. Jackson had half expected it to be preserved as it had been the day that Laura left it for the last time – he'd been in those kinds of shrines before, sadder and more faded by the year, but to his surprise Laura's bedroom showed no sign of her. It was decorated in neutral colors in the style of a hotel and was nothing more than a guest bedroom. "Not that I have guests," Theo said, with that sad, drooping smile he had. He was like one of those big melancholic dogs, a Newfoundland or a Saint Bernard. Oh no, he was thinking like Julia. What kind of a dog was he? He'd said " Labrador " because it was the first dog that came into his mind. Jackson didn't know dogs, he'd never had one, not even as a kid. His father had hated dogs.

Jackson remembered what Laura Wyre's room looked like ten years ago. There'd been a patchwork quilt, a tank of tropical fish, a pile of teddy bears on the bed. Books everywhere, clothes on the floor, cosmetics, photographs. It was as untidy as you might expect an eighteen-year-old's bedroom to be. That wasn't the impression of Laura that Theo gave now. In death, she had become incapable of untidiness, of flaws. Laura had become a saint in Theo's memory, a holy girl. Jackson supposed that was natural.

Ten years ago there had been a framed photograph on the wall of her bedroom – a picture of Laura with a dog. She was pretty and had a lovely smile. She looked like a nice girl, not a saint, but a nice girl. Jackson thought of Olivia, safe in the wallet in his pocket, grinning, unseen in the darkness. "Enclosed." That's what Amelia had said about Sylvia when he asked her if she'd been invited to the funeral. ("Not even Sylvia?") "Of course we told her," Amelia said, "but she can't come, she's not allowed out. She's enclosed."

Was Olivia enclosed somewhere, under a floor, in the earth? No more than a tiny pile of leveret-thin bones waiting to be found.

Jackson had been in Laura's bedroom by chance. He was working on another case at the time, a girl called Kerry-Anne Brockley who had disappeared from the Chesterton area of town. Kerry-Anne was sixteen years old, unemployed and certainly no virgin. She had been killed on her way home from a night out with friends – raped, strangled, and dumped in a field outside town.